All that work just to make it the same as what we already have

With a blocklist, the user is putting their trust in an unnamed group of people with essentially no accountability. With defederation, the user puts their trust in admins they can talk to, with a public modlog to explain every decision. You’re proposing to take the same amount of control away from users, but with less accountability.

Because in order to block content, the user first has to see it. If I were an instance admin, I wouldn’t force my users to see any amount of N words and homophobic slurs, not even the once it takes to block it.